Archive for the ‘gold watch’ tag

In 1923, John L. Maloney went to work for Ternstedt Manufacturing, a Detroit-based firm that by then had essentially become a supplier to Fisher Body. Assigned to the body shop, he found himself working all day long in clouds of sawdust raised by the machines that cut wood to the size and shape necessary to frame car bodies. It wasn’t exactly the kind of environment that breeds enthusiasm and optimism for the future, but Maloney stuck with it.

Ternstedt, founded initially to make car window regulators after Alvar Ternstedt’s patent for the technology, quickly took on the manufacture of other car parts after Alvar Ternstedt died and after Fisher Body acquired the company in 1920. It stamped body panels, it produced body hardware, and after Fisher Body – and thus Ternstedt – became wholly owned by General Motors in 1926, it branched out into an ever-widening variety of products.

Maloney’s job would also evolve while with Ternstedt, Fisher, and GM. He would eventually become a truck driver, then chauffeur for GM executives, according to his son, also named John. “I remember he would sometimes come home for lunch with a car from the motor pool, often a Rocket 88 Oldsmobile,” John said. “He would drive me back to school after the lunch break, and some of my friends would run over to look at the shiny new car. Once it was an early Corvette, which caused quite a stir at the school yard.”

John Maloney appears in this 1949 photo, front row, fourth from the right.

And the senior Maloney’s longevity counted for something too. In the spring of 1949, General Motors acknowledged his quarter century of service with the company with both a formal dinner for other 25-year employees of the Ternstedt Division and an engraved Hamilton 14-karat gold watch.

Maloney ended up staying with GM until 1964 (that’s his last day of work at the top of this post) and passing both the watch and the letter from GM on to his son. “I was told by the watchmaker who restored it that this was the best American watch you could purchase in the late 1940s,” John said. “Quite a gift from the General to a factory worker.”